Top result is a dubious spammy-looking link that actually leads to a clean webpage for the commercial album Mongolian Folk Songs<\/em>, with embedded audio clips for each track. Nice. The next two links are YouTube videos. At the foot of the first page is a link of some use, a short English-language 2005 Xinhua press-agency story carried by the Chinese People’s Daily<\/em> newspaper talking of “1100 Mongolian folk songs rescued”.<\/p>\n Microsoft Bing:<\/strong><\/p>\n Not bad, not bad at all. Better than Google by far. The Wikipedia page “Music of Mongolia” is result number one, but result number 4 gets top marks – a direct link into the Mongolian-run UNESCO-accredited International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations website, detailing (in good English) a major fieldwork song-gathering project now underway, “Heritage of the Mongolian Long Folk Song” (2008-2010). Result number six is also strong – a link into the new Smithsonian Folkways<\/em> magazine, recommending two albums.<\/p>\n Google Scholar:<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh dear. The top result is free. But it’s a PDF of the vintage book The Souls of Black Folk<\/em> (1903) by W.E.B. Du Bois, and this only seems to mention the word ‘Mongolian’ in passing. Misleadingly, the date of the book is labelled in the results as “2007”. There’s only one other free result on the page, a Google Books link to Mongolian music, dance, & oral narrative: performing diverse identities<\/em> (University of Washington Press, 2001). Tucked away at the bottom of page three of the results is some free and useful full-text, the 1997 article “Mongolian Oral Epic Poetry: An Overview” from the scholarly journal Oral Tradition<\/em>. Everything else on the first few pages is trapped behind a paywall.<\/p>\n Google Book Search:<\/strong><\/p>\n Mongolian music, dance, & oral narrative: performing diverse identities<\/em>\u200e appears again, and is number one. The link for it gives a “limited preview” link that leads to a deep interior page discussing the “overhaul” of classification of different types of song under communist rule. There’s only one other “limited-preview” result on the first page, linking to the book The Horse-head Fiddle and the Cosmopolitan Reimagination of Mongolia<\/em>. On page two there’s another “limited-preview” book, and it’s the 2008 Lonely Planet<\/em> guide-book to Mongolia.<\/p>\n Google news:<\/strong><\/p>\n A surprise. Not bad, if you’re looking for contemporary performance. Number two is a Financial Times<\/em> arts report “Steppes of Dreamers, Ukrainian Pavillion, Venice [biennale]” and talks of… ‘a Mongolian folk song, deconstructed into three elements of wind instrument, voice and whistle’. Then there are various journalistic puffs for folk performances. Halfway down the page is a PSFK trend-spotting agency report on a free 50-minute “Podcast Documentary on Chinagrass<\/a> – Contemporary Chinese Folk Music, performed by Hanggai … a Beijing-based Mongolian folk band composed of 5 members who feature the distinctive Morin Khuur and throat-singing.” Sounds great! The article is Creative Commons, too. Near the bottom of the results is a link to China Central Television proclaiming “Xinjiang preserves ethnic folk arts”.<\/p>\n Bing news search:<\/strong><\/p>\n Findarticles.com (free):<\/strong><\/p>\n Intute Arts and Humanities:<\/strong><\/p>\n Archive.org texts:<\/strong><\/p>\n OAIster:<\/strong><\/p>\n Intute UK repository search:<\/strong><\/p>\n DOAJ search:<\/strong><\/p>\n Open J-Gate:<\/strong><\/p>\n IngentaConnect:<\/strong><\/p>\n JISC ticTOCs:<\/strong> (search tables of contents from major journal publishers)<\/p>\n CiteSeer:<\/strong><\/p>\n Sweet Search<\/strong><\/p>\n Supposedly an academic search engine, the top results were from www.emusic.com (trying to sell me MP3s), the state-owned www.chinadaily.com.cn, www.npr.org, and bbc.co.uk. To be fair, it does a good job of clearing the web of spam, but the lack of academic articles in the results shows that it’s aimed at school children rather than those at university.<\/p>\n Scientific Commons:<\/strong><\/p>\n EBSCO Open Science Directory<\/strong><\/p>\n China Academic Journals<\/a> full-text:<\/strong><\/p>\n Scirius:<\/strong><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/2009\/06\/icon_skull.gif\"){kind=icon}
“We did not find any results for Mongolian folk song.” Some way to go, I think.<\/p>\n The first four results are duplicates of a short 2005 press story “China, Mongolia to protect endangered ethnic song”, then the results default to articles on other unrelated types of folk song.<\/p>\n Zero results. If the search terms are changed to Mongolia + song then I get a record for the “Music of Tuva” website. Tuva being near to Mongolia, and now in Russia.<\/p>\n Zero results. If the search is limited to just ‘Mongolian’ then I get a wide range of books including an avalanche of dusty pre-1920s linguistic studies, and er… “Racial Origins of the Jews – Eugen Fischer. An article from the defunct neo-nazi magazine”<\/em>. Oh dear. In amongst the avalanche there are several scanned editions of Sagas from the Far East: Or, Kalmouk and Mongolian Traditionary Tales<\/em> (1873).<\/p>\n Zero results.<\/p>\n Zero results.<\/p>\n Zero results.<\/p>\n Zero results.<\/p>\n Zero results.<\/p>\n Zero results for a search in titles or subject. Even the word ‘Mongolian’ on its own found no results.<\/p>\n Mostly science, but I thought there might be some linguistic or ethnographic materials indexed. I used the search: Mongolian AND folk AND song, and included citations in the search. Two results, neither relevant. Using Mongolian AND song obtained more, but not better, results.<\/p>\n One result, to what is now a dead ‘404’ link.<\/p>\n Zero results.<\/p>\n Just three results from a 1915-2009 search, one in English (“Mongolian Folk Song and Dance Troupe Visits China”, which was a short news report from the state-run Voice of Friendship<\/em> magazine).<\/p>\n The first two results are useful, but both lead to “404 not found” messages. The first page of results show that Scirius search is confused by Chinese science authors whose surname is “Song”, and by references to the Song dynasty.<\/p>\n
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